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Sunday, 5 August 2012

Examples

Today I read an interesting article on Hemingway,
interesting eventually, that is, once it got past its opening obsession with
examples. Hemingway liked to use
specific nouns, the writer of the article said, for example when talking about
drink: for instance, he would never just say someone had a drink, it had to be
a grappa or a cognac, a Cinzano or a chianti, a brandy, some vermouth, a …
well, you get the idea.

On and on the article went, listing examples of the specific
types of drinks Hemingway might refer to, and providing excerpts from his
novels to show the examples. Enough
already, I thought; I get the point.

When I was teaching English, back in another century, the
textbooks told me to tell the students to use examples. And examples of course can be a fine
thing. I take part in an Aristotle
seminar these days – fine man, Aristotle, even when I disagree with him, maybe
especially when I disagree with him, but he can be cryptic at times. What does he mean, I sometimes say? If only he would give an example.

That’s when an example would be useful. Or even two.
To elucidate, explain, make clear.
Not to hammer home the point that’s already crystal clear. Not to prove something.

How deadly it is to try and prove something you already know. I had to give up a master’s thesis once,
because all it was going to be was a collection of evidence to prove what I
already knew about Cromwell and the English Civil War. How boring.
(Also disconcerting when it turned out I couldn’t find the evidence, and
in fact found evidence disproving my theory; but my point is that even if all
the evidence had been there, what a waste of time to just pile it up in support
of something, letting it sit lifeless in a pile, not stimulating you to find
new theories, just very carefully proving the simple point you began with.)

This is why I couldn’t stand the five-paragraph essay
formula I was also supposed to teach. I
did draw the line there; one has to have some standards. The five-paragraph formula is actually
egregious for all sorts of reasons, but the one relevant here is that it asks
the budding writer to frontload his thesis and then spend the rest of his essay
proving it. This formula unfortunately
has infected a good deal of academic writing; every learned article these days
begins by saying, “In this article I will demonstrate that blue cheese is
blue,” or something like that, and I think, Well, if that’s all you’re going to
do, why do I need to read past your thesis sentence?

I like to write essays and articles that don’t necessarily
know where they’re going, like this one, for which I don’t seem to have an
ending. I could refer to Aristotle
again, though, who in the section of his Rhetoric
on using examples while making a speech actually provides examples. Fitting, I suppose, but totally out of
character. So much so that the leader of
our seminar said, This doesn’t sound like Aristotle at all. It was certainly much clearer, and as I said,
an example can be great to make things clear.
But please don’t burden us with long lists of them after you’ve made
your point; go on to other things.